


Sæhrímnir

by 35grams



Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Genre: Body Horror, Body Worship, Enemies With Benefits, Masochism, Other, Rivalry, Slow Burn, Unreliable Narrator, Violence, occasional lobahound but it's not primary or endgame
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2021-02-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:20:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28354572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/35grams/pseuds/35grams
Summary: "But however great may be the throng in Valhal, they will get plenty of flesh of the boar Sæhrímnir. He is boiled every day and is whole again in the evening."The Prose Edda, Chapter XII
Relationships: Bloodhound/Revenant (Apex Legends)
Comments: 42
Kudos: 85





	1. Chapter 1

Bloodhound discovers it by accident. 

Their team has been dodging shots from the games' most feared competitor for an hour. The simulacrum had lost his teammates to theirs in an opening scuffle and took it upon himself to hound them for the rest of the match. Out of pettiness, maybe, or boredom. So little else to do with eternity. 

All attempts to put an end to the potshots and flush him out only attracts other teams. Between the shrapnel and gunfire, he vanishes. Bloodhound is usually able to lure him away from their less experienced teammates, even from other teams if they catch him in a more depraved mood than usual. Shepherd them to safety and maneuver stronger teams in his way until he loses interest in theirs. 

This time, they cannot. Once their teammates realize who stalks them, they wince and leap at every sound like lost fawns despite all Hound's attempts to steel their hearts. As they cross into swampland and slough through thick, muddy waters, he must lose interest in artfully nicking fingers and toes. One head becomes red mist. As the other bolts for cover, so does theirs. A young freighter pilot and a back-alley scrapper. Children with guns and debts. 

The machine makes himself known soon enough. Soundless footsteps fall a little heavier. Metal plates rattle just enough to hear. When they turn, the boiling sun glints on sharpened steel-alloy fingers, on chipped horns and old blood. No rifle in sight, no sidearm. He hums. A pitying metallic rumble. 

"Said goodnight to your little lambs?"

By the time Hound realizes how close he is, there is no time to grab anything but their axe. 

He swings first. Hound dodges one arm only to notice the other too late. It swipes at the earth and splatters their lenses with vegetation and mud as the first arcs back around and slashes at their side. Shallow. Unserious. Two hearts stopped so the simulacrum could play.

It happens then. Their axe has split him a hundred times. Hound knows where that metal gives, knows how it whines, when it screams. But they did not know this.

Bloodhound has him pinned to the earth, axe buried in his chest. They twist and turn. It does not come out. A scarlet hand claws at Bloodhound's face, finds purchase, and squeezes until the respirator shell groans, until leather begins to tear. The axe budges free, but its betrayal is final. Their respirator cord is already twisted around his other hand. 

In a burst of blind panic, Hound reaches inside his flickering, cleaved chest, grasps every live wire they can gather, and rakes them hard across hot interior circuitry. 

His body convulses instantly. It must have affected even his vocal processor: he does not make a single sound aside from the clatter of his metal exterior. Even once Bloodhound tears away, finds their legs, and raises a barrel to that pallid skull, it shudders and stares, unseeing, into the hot, indifferent sun. 

His staccato, shuddering little gasps are almost lifelike. Almost pitiful. They stop when Bloodhound sinks a bullet between his eyes.

They put it out of their mind for the rest of the match, but it is all they can think about on the flight out. In all their close encounters, they have never seen him shut down like this. 

Bloodhound knows he has been seeking them out on purpose. Knows he cannot find another fighter who lasts longer against him without a gun. One who even bests him if he grows complacent.

Maybe this is the end of it. Surely the machine prefers picking off a galaxy's selection of desperate gladiators than crossing the path of someone who has just discovered his off switch. 

Bloodhound has never been so entirely, unnervingly wrong. 

They have never seen more of that deathless machine than in the matches that followed. Never have Hound's teammates fallen so quickly. Many breathe their last, while those few who have the means to lease respawn chambers do not compete again, going as far as to break their contracts and condemn themselves to Syndicate indentured service than to see that face again.

Their axe has never split him this often. When he comes, he comes closer and faster. Fine. Maybe he needs a reminder.

Backed into a canyon wall, Hound flips them, hacks into his chest, reaches in, and shocks him mindless. Harder this time. Longer. They try not to enjoy it too much.

Again, his limbs fail him. Again, he falls to the earth like a tossed doll. In this match. In the next. And the next. It is only when the games' commentators begin to remark on the single-mindedness of the simulacrum's silent pursuits that Bloodhound is sure that this bewildering pattern is not in their head.

They are patching a deep cut in their arm in the arena medbay after a game. A familiar, delicate clinking grows closer.

"Hound."

Andrade takes a seat on the bench beside them. She shoos away their distracted, one-handed wrapping attempt and does it herself.

She gives them little sidelong glances. "What's going on?"

They pat dry a trickle of blood that escaped their cut before it can stain her sleeve. "What do you mean?"

She gives them a disappointed look. They know better than to feign ignorance with her, of all people, but they are not sure how to talk about this. Defeated adversaries have held grudges against Bloodhound before and acted on them often enough, but never with such devotion.

"Nearly every team I'm sorted with," she says, "they've started to follow that demon instead of shooting him, because they know he will lead them to you. Everyone wants to say they personally defeated the reigning champion." 

"They are free to try."

She secures the bandage with one of her own jeweled pins. "Not the point. That thing is throwing himself at you so often that it's being factored in rotation strategy."

Bloodhound realizes something as she speaks. Something they should have seen before.

The hitch in their breath must reassure her. She holds one of their hands between her own.

"I'm better with pistols, but if I have a sniper on my team, I will convince them to give him a hard time, distract him from-"

"No," they say, a touch sharper than they meant. Bloodhound gives her shoulder a reassuring touch and rises. "Do not give it another thought. Fight to win. This...fixation or vendetta or whatever it is...it will pass." 

She rises after them and wraps them in an embrace. 

"Can I be a little selfish?"

They nod against her and watch the elegant waves of gold in her earrings.

"He's taken enough from me," she says. "Please don't join the list."

On the flight back to the Solace orbital station where combatants rest and train between tightly scheduled matches, Bloodhound unspools every encounter they've had since the first shock. They wanted to think it was luck. But no one is this lucky, this often.

After every chest-splitting swing, Revenant had pushed closer. He should have retreated. Every animal, every sentient being, even intelligently programmed hardware would have retreated to a safe distance if they wished to live. If not the first time, then surely the second. The third. The fourth. 

Throwing himself, she had said.

Bloodhound reaches for their phone and searches arena footage to buttress their memory, only to watch in disbelief at just how many are angled so awkwardly or in such unforgiving terrain that the aerial drones capture little else but frantic, unintelligible swinging. More than half of their encounters had not been captured at all.

Hound has paralyzed him at least half a dozen times, something that, to their knowledge, no one else has ever done, and not once has it been witnessed by the most robust surveillance system in the frontier.

It pains them, but they deliberately do not bring their axe to the next game. When Revenant is close enough to realize this, Bloodhound wakes in their respawn chamber with a dull ache between their eyes. 

They forego it a second time. Revenant corners them as they pick through a canyon-facing cabin for ammunition, having waited for them in the rafters. For the first time since the simulacrum introduced himself to the games, Bloodhound steps back. They have never felt a viler, more venomous intent from a living being. 

"Hello, hunter."

He stalks closer. Even the voice modulator strains. His words warble and dip almost past understanding. Bloodhound has their back to the door, teammates watching all exits, and a charged Devotion pointed at his horned skull and still, they cannot quiet the howling of their animal brain, cannot stop the blood draining from their hands and feet, cannot blink away the burning stars in their eyes as the three hundred year old simulacrum, alone and empty-handed, strides soundlessly right up to the end of their barrel.

"Once is a mistake," he says, grasps the barrel with infinite care, and raises it a hair at a time. Hound does not know why they let him do this. They do not know why they let him step closer. Close enough to count the hairline fractures in his teeth.

"Twice is a habit," he goes on.

Wordlessly, and with that same absurdly delicate precision, he parts his synthetic mane and maneuvers a black handle from inside a hollow formed by a dislocated shoulder blade. It is the handle of their axe. 

All thoughts of how and why and when fade as Revenant slips it out entirely and drags the blunt end against Bloodhound's respirator cord. All is quiet but for a rhythmic click. A small metallic heartbeat.

A crimson hand closes over Bloodhound's, parts it finger by finger from the trigger of the raised Devo, and wraps it around the handle of the axe. Blood rushes in their ears.

"There won't be a third," Revenant promises. 

Bloodhound meets his deathless stare and says a prayer. Matching the simulacrum's excruciatingly slow, deliberate pace, they raise their axe and drag it screeching from the hollow center of his collarbone and down the swell of his sternum. Feather-light at first touch. Deepening as it descends until the black metal is embedded in the first segment of his abdomen.

Revenant traces the split. Gathers dust-like metal scrapings between his fingers and watches them fall between them, watches the harsh glint as they catch dying sunlight. His chest rises and falls with a harsh, shuddering sigh, though civilizations rose and fell since he last possessed lungs. 

Blood roars again in their ears, but this time, it is not fear that deafens them. They grab a fistful of his mane and shove him against the cabin wall with enough force to hear it splinter. Pin his pliant, eager body with a hand around his rumbling throat.

"No," Bloodhound says, and raises their axe. "There will not."


	2. Chapter 2

When Bloodhound is through with him, the echo of his final sigh throws itself against the walls before finding a home in their ear for days. It lingers with them when they eat, when they hunt, when they sleep.

Bloodhound is inclined to quiet their racing thoughts. If the machine has taken a liking to this manner of execution for a week or three, so be it. They cannot believe he derives any pleasure from it. From the first touch of axe to chest to the final spark, he is in obvious, excruciating pain. He will lose interest eventually, and until then, he is simply one less combatant in their way. 

They visit the arena medbay after the match. A medic on staff checks their vitals and allows them a private room to examine and dress their more superficial injuries before leaving. They clean the scattering of shallow cuts on their arms - shrapnel from windows and doors - and dress deeper slashes from a kunai with an impressed hum.

The bruises on their thighs are never far from their eye. Hound grips their trousers, finally stands to pull them up, only to sit back down with a low growl. They have to check them. If there's a torn or fractured anything beneath that mass of purple and blue, it will make itself known eventually, and far less kindly. 

They press and feel the marks for any deeper injury. 

At some point, Bloodhound had thrown him to the floor and pinned him with their entire weight to smother his shocked jerks just enough that their arm is not torn apart while inside him. 

There was a curious moment when his hands grasped at their arm as if to push it closer - deeper - only to jerk away. The movement toward their arm was desperate but deliberate. The jerk backward was harsh and unnatural, as if an external force shoved him away. Or internal. Algorithmic. 

When he stopped fighting it, his hands grasped and scratched at the wooden floorboards instead until by chance they caught on Bloodhound's kneeplate, their boots, their thighs. They groaned as he squeezed and twisted mindlessly at each shock. When Hound tried a lighter touch, the grip softened. When they jerked the wires hard, they bit their tongue at the steel grip.

They grit their teeth as they pass over the blooming stains. The waves of pain are dizzying, but it is not physical intensity alone. They anchor them in the present - the gleam of instruments, the stench of antiseptic - pull them back into that sparking shack, and fling them into their next screeching encounter, all at once. Time disrespects not only him, but everything he touches.

Bloodhound dresses and leaves the medbay. Nothing is broken, but everything is sore. 

It does not feel deliberate. It does not feel like retribution, or a twisted kind of reward. It just is. 

Bloodhound hopes he does not remember what bruises feel like. If they are lucky, he will not know that his hands remained on their skin and deep in their muscle long after the segmented metal twitched its last. 

He finds them again. Away from the cameras, again. Bloodhound fells him, tears into him, again. 

He lands soundlessly on a stretch of peat beyond the vegetation-fringed mouth of some forgettable little cave curling through canyon walls. One horn is fractured from an impact against the cave wall. Moss and duckweed and earth slip between his body's seams as if they mean to reclaim him, to swallow him whole.

Bloodhound enters him. They feel along the hot chest walls before feathering the loose wires across his circuitry. No pulling like before, no yanking or thrashing. There is more than one way to get answers.

Revenant arches and hisses at each pass. His hands grasp and dig at the earth, but it is too soft and yielding to anchor him. Mindlessly, he pulls and claws at their jacket until Bloodhound leans forward so as not to fall and straddles him across that rolling abdomen. 

Hound watches him when they do this. Not despite but because the expressionless skull magnifies what little does betray the simulacrum's reactions. The wanton scraping and scoring of his horns against earth and stone. The rhythmic contraction of the carbon-fiber muscle at his jaw, his neck. The overloaded flickering in his eyes and in all the little lights scattered across his body.

One of his hands slips over their arm above the elbow, the one inside of him. Not to push or pull. Just there. A concession between him and his program, maybe. Hound feels the deliberate weight of it, is made aware of the muscle and tendon in their own arm working and knows that he, too, feels it relax and contract against his grip.

"Harder," he demands.

He bucks hard beneath them at the answering shock. Hound rides it out and grips him tighter with their thighs.

New sounds prickle at their ear. Metallic whines that rise both from the straining joints in his limbs and from his exposed throat.

Bloodhound spares him a few more sparks and earns themself a tighter, meaner hold at their hips in answer. 

"Your heart...ain't in it today...hunter." One hand rises and traces Bloodhound's respirator cord with a single finger. "Do you still need some..." It clinks against the gaps. "...convincing?" 

His breath, such as it is, comes in uneven shudders. There is even a pause, here and there, where he ostensibly inhales or swallows. None of this is borne out physically. He has no mouth. No throat. No lungs. 

This isn't new. He cries out when shot or when landing from a great height. Coughs and chokes when caught in the doctor's corrosive gas. Involuntary sounds. Reactions that this catastrophically proud creature would surely suppress if he could. 

They were never so occupied with these thoughts before, but they have never had him writhing and groaning beneath them before. Not like this.

Bloodhound gifts him a luxuriously lengthy rake across his chest wall until his hand falls away from their respirator cord. It clutches desperately at nothing until it finds the edge of their jacket. Bloodhound withdraws their arm from his chest. They pass their insulated fingers along the grooves and swells as they go, familiarizing themself with him in the few moments he is too overwhelmed to care.

He comes back to himself as his eyes stop flickering. He looks around the dim cavern and his still-mutilated body and hisses in the low, barely-there register Bloodhound knows is his most frustrated, most lethal. 

Bloodhound catches his arms before they could reach for their mask and pins them to the ground. His motor systems must still be recovering, or else they could have never been able to hold him. They do not have much time.

"Am I the only one who does this to you?" Bloodhound asks.

He stops struggling. His eyes flicker here and there as if in thought, but for so long that Bloodhound grows impatient.

"Surely you anticipated questions," Bloodhound says.

"Not this one. Not so soon."

Errant sparks and straining metal fill the silence. His reticence could mean anything. Typical obstinance. Or maybe there is another. He has openly hounded the young modder for upgrades and parts. Crypto's EMP stuns him a touch longer than anyone else. And Natalie...

"How possessive," he finally says. "Does it eat at you, to think another hand could be more talented than yours?"

Bloodhound notes the circuitous compliment and darts inside to shock him for deflecting. How pedestrian to be possessive of this, whatever it is. Of him, no less. They should be so lucky if there is another, if only to commiserate or compare notes. 

He growls as he comes back to himself. "What do you think?"

"I want you to say it."

"Don't feel like it."

He comes back from the latest shock with a breathy laugh. "You're no torturer. It's adorable watching you try."

"All of this," they say as they break off dangling bits of metal and glass from the edges of his split chest, "is not torture?"

"Never," he says. Bloodhound does not recognize his tone at first. He is so rarely sincere that they forget the sound of it. 

His hands break from their hold, but Bloodhound's alarm is tempered when all he does is pull them closer, their ear pressed to one side of his serrated maw. The vibration from his voice travels from his skull to Hound's until they hear nothing else but him.

"Not when you do it."

His hand leaves their head and glances off their thigh. Bloodhound is too lost in thought at that last hushed admission to remember to hide their wince. Revenant's round, unblinking eye darts instantly to theirs at their almost imperceptible little jolt. 

His hands pass over their bruised thighs with the same teasing drag Bloodhound had just used across his circuits.

"Can't be..." he rumbles as he grips them hard precisely where he had last time. Bloodhound's pained groan is ripped from their chest. No strength of will could have stopped it.

"Shh, I know. How trite would it be if I said I didn't mean it..." Revenant hums. He turns and clicks his carved teeth against their respirator. Bloodhound does not understand what the motion means. It is too mild to be a threat. It is too deliberate to mean nothing at all.

"I just forget," he says, flicking one of the strung bolts hanging from their helm. "So wrapped up in all your cured leather and steel..." 

His hands meander to their hips. The digits extend and encircle them before rocking them closer. 

"I forget you're just as soft..." he drawls with an alarmingly soothing, sinuous sweep from their hips to their knees and back again. 

"...as the rest of them."

A white flare rips through Bloodhound from their crown to the ends of their toes, blinds them, and melts their bones into the same soft, yielding earth that lies beneath them. They take it for pain, at first. Would that it have been all the pain in the nine realms. 

"Am I-" he starts.

They've had enough of this. All of it. Bloodhound's hand shoots for the wires.

"I wouldn't," Revenant says, but they are already inside. 

In the next moment, they pull their scalded arm out of his chest. It has never been this hot before. The earth beneath him steams. The duckweed pods cascading across his chest and the folds of his mane curl and char into dust before their eyes. 

It ends as soon as it began. The steam still streams liberally from the earth, but the scalding interior chest walls are already growing pale. It couldn't have been deliberate. If it was, he could have done this at any time. Held them fast and incinerated them at his leisure. Is that his game? Play the feeble little lamb until they are sufficiently tamed by his performed helplessness? To deny Bloodhound not only this life, but the next in the Æsir's exalted halls?

"Did you think you could do anything to me," Revenant drawls with infinite amusement, "that I didn't want done?"

Bloodhound's lenses begin to cloud. 

"Did you think..."

They hold their burned arm to their chest. 

"...all this time..."

Their animal brain howls awake. It barks and snarls, incensed at being muzzled by the higher mind that wants worthless ephemera like answers and motives and reason while flesh burns and skin blooms red and purple and blue.

"...you were in control?" 

Bloodhound wrenches away, swings their axe and splits his hands from his wrists before delivering a blow to his chest that cleaves the back wall and sinks their axe into the dry peat. 

"You're the only one," Revenant says as they wrench it out of him, as blissfully unbothered as they are infuriated. 

Bloodhound swings again. 

His voice skips and grows indecipherable. Bloodhound splits his skull in two. They howl themself hoarse in the echoing cavern, and in the shadow of his last words:

"Am I?" 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Penance for making you wait two months for the last update lol

The next time he finds them alone, Bloodhound shoots him dead. 

And the time after that. The one after that, too. They do not allow him near enough to even speak to them. 

Eventually, he gives it up. He does not approach them anymore. He does not hunt them across canyons or valleys or abandoned cities. Their paths cross only by chance in the usual rhythm of the match, at which point an impersonal bullet or two sends either him to a new body, or them to the trauma ward. When the matchmakers place them on the same team, he does not show up.

Were it not for the blisters and scabs across their arm, they might spare a drop of pity for him, hunting and maiming and killing as he does now without a sliver of his old joy. He couldn't give someone a papercut without a pithy line or a laugh before. 

He is silent now. He has never hunted so well, killed so many. Matches become noticeably shorter because teams would rather throw themselves at one another than spend a second longer than they must in an arena with his shadow in it.

It is in the looping highlight reels after the match that Bloodhound sees what Revenant is doing when he is not painstakingly luring them into some secluded cabin or cave. Disembowelment. Decapitations. Towering billboards and banners pixelate the most stomach-churning footage and yet the crimson squares dance all day and night in streets, in bars, in homes. Commentators denounce the violence with smiling faces as they breathlessly examine his form and make bets on how many more will find themselves dangling on his arm by next week. 

Even when he first entered the games, it was never like this. Never this desperate. Miserable, even for him. 

Something else is different. Bloodhound pitied his prey before, but now they feel something else. A growing, inescapable, poisonous shame.

No one would blame them for his violence. For the deaths, the misery. But no one knows that they were the reason almost no one died by his hand for weeks. There are hearts beating at this very second that would instead be rotting or incinerated were it not for Bloodhound humoring one odd little fixation. There are hearts rotting now that should be beating. Blue, idle feet that could be dancing. Noses filled with the scent of the heaving earth after a heavy rain.

No one knows that they should have been alive. None but Bloodhound. 

They cannot singlehandedly rid the world of cruelty. Of creatures like him. But they don't have to. Every living soul is a world. Every pair of lingering eyes is the universe gazing upon itself, loving and knowing itself. 

They are rubbing a salve on a cut on Artur's foot when they understand that they cannot do nothing anymore. 

If this game of his is some long, convoluted ploy, so be it. If they fall so that another pair of eyes may gaze a while longer, then may it be so memorable that the Allfather asks to hear it twice.

As soon as they recover from their most recent match, they track him to the mouth of one of the labyrinthine tunnels winding beneath King's Canyon. Their boots kick up dust and old shells. The clinks echo nearly without end. The mouth is twice, maybe three times their height. 

They step away and hold out their arm until Artur hops from their shoulder.

"Be my eyes," they request, and bid him to fly.

There is no need to enter. Every beast knows when a stranger has approached its den. 

Together, they prepare and then wait. Arena autocleaners have already swept this area and should not disturb them. No one and nothing else stirs here but the wildlife between scheduled matches. Bloodhound strums a stråkharpa at the foot of a tree they once bled beneath. Twin moons embrace in a cloudless sky.

When the first improvised EMP mine pops in the distance, Bloodhound transitions to the final cords. Their ears sing as the last strum coincides with the second mine. The low whine of distant electric discharge dances with fraying horsehair strings.

Bloodhound follows the trail of activated and hastily escaped traps. They sense he has powered down significantly to avoid being seen by their infrared sublenses by the fading, barely-there trace of his footsteps, but it is not enough. They break into a run with Artur overhead.

The trail winds into an industrial site. Bloodhound passes it, as does Artur. In three strides, it reappears and veers away into a forested worksite. They ignore this too, and in five strides, it reappears again. Bloodhound has witnessed him prowl and stalk and flank his marks. They know what an assassin looks like. This does not mean they can outflank him.

Revenant has seen Bloodhound track their prey. This does not mean he can escape them. 

Artur cries out and flies faster. Black on deep indigo. 

Bloodhound rushes to meet his pace and unclasps the silver-coated carbon whip at their hip. When they round a forested bend, they catch a speck of movement at an open manhole, crack the whip, send five thousand volts cascading down its length, and pull until they haul the simulacrum, shuddering and steaming, out of the tunnel and thrown against the earth.

Apart from involuntary shudders as the current races through his unmodified, native body, he is still. Bloodhound disengages their infrared before he blinds them. He is incandescent. Must have overclocked himself a few moments ago for one last mad dash.

Bloodhound treads purposefully around him until they can see his face, and crouch beside him approximately one of his arm length's away. The electric whip is still lashed around his ankle, but there is no "too careful" around him.

He does not speak. His eyes do not even dart to examine them. The final shudders make their way out out of his frame, and he is still as a corpse.

The moons complete their brief sojourn and separate. The canyons darken as they part, neither shining as heartbreakingly bright as they had side by side.

Bloodhound takes a seat, rolls up their sleeve, and unbottles the ointment they have been using to soothe their arm. 

The earth below him glows a faint yellow as serpentine eyes dart upward. He watches them gather it with two fingers and spread it into their healing, flaking skin. Bloodhound takes longer than usual. They rub it into a sore dry spot as one moon swims over the arch of his pallid brow. 

When they finish, they balance their uncovered arm against one knee and let it breathe. Minutes or an hour later, a crimson arm inches toward the capped bottle between them. He uncaps it, gathers a drop or two from the rim, and brings it closer to examine it.

"Nothing you could do to a living being," Bloodhound says, "could ever be as cruel as the body's desperation to heal itself."

A passing gale rustles the canopy above them.

"Burned skin cries out only to slough away, abandoned," they say. "Scabs - great selfless scaffolds - protect and nurture before crumbling thanklessly into dust. And when the children of stars pass too quickly through our flesh and convince one single, solitary cell to become selfish - to nurture only itself - the body will eat itself alive."

Revenant brings the drop to his arm and repeats the circular motion. All he creates is a soft, rhythmic screech and an unabsorbed, translucent smear on his wrist.

"I was not angered by the burn," they say. "Or your unserious threats."

His arm returns to the earth.

"I do not have one billion bodies. I have one. You disrespect my mortality even as you desire it. Mine, especially."

His eyes flash. 

"I want my own, hunter," he finally speaks. "You can keep yours."

"You want mine as well. Dearly. You wish to die by a worthy mortal, no? If this was not so, you could have chosen any number of intelligent, undying machines to satisfy you."

He hums. It's a fond one. Bloodhound tells themself that knowing this is no different from knowing the mood of a beast by the tenor of its cries or the angle of its tail.

"You're too wordy for me, Blood, dumb it down some. Fine. Yeah. If I'm going out again and again and forced to remember every bit of it, I want it to be worth remembering. Want it to mean something."

Bloodhound is impressed. To think this creature is still capable of yearning for meaning in between spilling oceans of blood. They are cut out of their reverie when he goes on:

"I want it to be you."

"Why me?"

"Course you'd ask why. How modest. How honorable and selfless," he croons, becoming lost in himself before pulling himself out. "I want someone who knows how to kill. Wants to kill."

"There are many-"

"Bathes in it."

"It is a figure of speech-"

"And someone who still believes in something."

Bloodhound's words are lost on their tongue. Anything at all? Spiritual belief? Or something specific? Something only he can see?

"The last one surprises me," they admit.

"It shouldn't. No fun unless there's a tiny little chance that...well."

"That...?"

"Changed my mind. That's for me to know. And you to lose sleep over."

"I do not care as much as you imagine it."

Revenant laughs.

"No more questions then, oh, uncaring one?"

"Why the shocks?"

"I'm just into that now. Might get into immolation or strangulation later. I'll be sure to let you know."

Bloodhound scoffs. "Sure. Maybe drowning."

"No drowning," he says in a tone that forbids argument.

He doesn't lie as well as he thinks. The shocks cannot be some random fancy. He crashed, rudderless, from one kill and one death to another for months, but the moment he died from that first overloading shock, he had eyes for no one but Bloodhound. 

It is easier to believe that than this supposed liking he's taken to them, of all people. They are no braver than Makoa, not anywhere as selfless as Che or as violent as half the arena at any given time. Though they have no strategy but to carve and swipe, whatever they do in there is so blindingly desirable that they are not sure if he even tried to find another.

"What's the trouble?" he says. "All you gotta do is kill a very bad man. Machine. Beast. Take your pick. I'll be anything you want."

"Do not pretend to help me. You luxuriate in my "trouble"."

He hums. "I can do both."

He reaches for them. Bloodhound pointedly moves away and rises to their feet.

"You did not think I would forgive you so quickly?"

He whines. 

Bloodhound retracts the whip from his ankle. "You want me to kill you? Me, alone?"

He flexes his foot and rises to stand. Bloodhound unsheathes their axe and guides him back down to his knees with the flat of the blade at his shoulder. He stiffens as if to shove it aside, then falls to his knees with a low, indignant sound.

"Yes."

"Then do not spill my blood again."

"I'll do my very best," he drawls. "But machines are funny, hunter. All my good intentions won't mean a thing if you touch something that shouldn't be touched."

"I will decide what is accident and what is intent."

"You-"

"Should I regard this as charity?" Bloodhound interrupts. "Or would you prefer to earn it?"

He is struck silent for a moment before breaking into a low laugh. Under his breath, they would say, if he could breathe.

"I knew it," he sighs. The sound skips in the way a voice might crack. "I knew you were the one." His earlier protest is forgotten.

"Yeah. I'll earn it," he says. "Anything you want. The head of a goliath-eater? The tongues of the men who razed your planet? What about-"

"Do not kill a single living soul for one week," Bloodhound says, "and I will slay you after taking you apart in any way you please."

He does not speak. Slowly, he sinks from his knees to sit on his heels. There is a rising hum and growing warmth they cannot place until they realize his processor must be clinging to life from how his thoughts race to parse their offer. They take care not to even accidentally activate their infrared lest they blind themself.

He raises his head a touch. 

"Any way I please?"

"Within reason," Bloodhound adds tersely.

He watches them a moment longer with his bright, unblinking eyes.

"Fine."

They step back and offer their hand. He rises, takes it, and pulls them closer. His eyes' ambient yellow glow fills their lenses. The hue renders the world in turns sickly and rotting, and then jewel-like, resplendent. 

"One week," he says. 

Time passes like a rip current. In one week, down to the hour and with game commentators in a rapture over the simulacrum's inexplicable newfound mercy - to the extent that leaving his prey bleeding out just slowly enough to get medical attention can be named so - they meet again under the lidded eyes of waning moons. 

His request is ambiguous and vague. He encourages Bloodhound to simply "dig around" and "have fun". They pry and tease for more, but he refuses to be specific. 

Bloodhound barely pushes him before he lays himself out on the cool cabin floor. A dizzying sight when, in that first encounter that inspired all the rest, it had taken nearly all their strength to get him there.

It is his native body. Black and crimson with a single plate of white. Their blood rushes in their ears as they step over him, towering over him for a change. 

They start by opening him up, because it is familiar. When his chest is exposed, they switch to a knife and weave through the mess of cables and cords and straps inside. There is much more of it in this body than the beast's. It is less modern, less automated. An older design. A mess of an interior and yet quieter than any of the others whenever he slinks around a chokepoint. 

They pick through it, parting fabric and metal and plastic. They learn the sounds he makes when they pull, when they scratch, when they cut. They play the ones they like again and again. 

Suddenly, he stretches, arching his back and extending his fingers before settling back down and laying one hand across his padded abdomen with a long, satisfied sound. It is just above where Hound sits, and rides up one of their thighs when they lean forward for a closer look or a better grip.

Bloodhound grows self-conscious. They could do this for hours, but they hardly see how this is worth his week-long abstinence.

"You are enjoying...this?"

"Why not? You are," he says, as if that makes sense.

Bloodhound has been quietly piecing and slotting together all his casual little comments and reactions and sounds. They are not so naïve as to take him at his word, any word.

He stopped killing at merely the promise of more of this, so he must truly want it. But why Bloodhound and no one else, they still cannot fathom. And why this odd, indecipherable request, they cannot understand. 

Uncertainties mount until they fear they cannot lose themself in him again. They prod along anyway, but he must sense their reticence.

"Blood."

"Hm?"

"Bite me."

Bloodhound huffs and pries with more feeling. They can take a hint. Revenant stills them with a hand on their arm.

"I mean it. Bite me."

Bloodhound's throat seizes shut. They would laugh if he were not startlingly sincere.

"Y-you want me..."

"Anywhere."

"With...with my..."

"If you got any other kind of teeth, I'm game."

"Uh. No, just the. The one pair," they say as their mind stumbles about for how to possibly respond to this. No, obviously. Categorically. 

"Blind me."

They stop entirely and look at him. Surely they didn't hear right.

"So I don't see it coming," he adds.

He is serious. Bloodhound buys themself a few more moments of furious thinking as they slowly reach over to lower his headwrap, only for their hand to be slapped away.

"Pay attention," he says. "I didn't say blindfold."

He watches their hand as it hovers over his eyes. They trace one crimson, painted tear with their thumb from the lower edge of his faceplate to just beneath his eye. They sweep along the unmoving lid. Then, across the unblinking eye itself. 

He sighs.

"I can't get enough of you," he says. "So much reverence wasted on some glass and metal."

Bloodhound stiffens at this new, carefree fondness. He is so often nothing but coarse and vile that when he isn't, his words are somehow at once unbelievable, and magnified a thousandfold.

"Why not?" they echo him. "It is your glass. Your metal."

He wraps a hand around their wrist in a lazy grip, the one supporting themself beside his head as they examine how best to do this.

"Sentimental, even for you," he says. "You'll kill me and leave it here and never think about it again."

"What I touch now is yours. You."

"It's not," he growls. "You're touching scrap."

"I am touching you."

He growls something too low to hear.

"When you depart from it, it will have born witness to all you have seen," Bloodhound says. "Weathered and aged from all you have done. And when the earth reclaims it, you will forever be a part of her, too."

His grip tightens on their wrist.

"You've got the wrong audience for your little meditations on immortality."

Bloodhound watches slivers of moonlight embrace the divots and grooves in that darting, delicate little instrument as they lower their knife. 

"You were thrust into a pale imitation of it. Corrupted and cruel."

"There ain't any other kind."

"You do not believe so," they say. "Not truly. You would see and admire it all around you, if only you stopped to look. Nothing truly dies."

His hand tightens again. It hurts.

"Shut up."

"If you had the choice, wouldn't you rather be a gust of wind? Caressing a beautiful autumn leaf? Carving mountaintops?"

"That's not-"

"Or a droplet of morning dew on a silk web," they say. "On a budding leaf. Shaken off the back of a waking beetle-"

His hands shoot to their head, caging it between them and shuddering with the effort it must take to remember whose neck they are about to snap.

"I stand corrected," he says lowly. "For this brand of torture, you're a born natural."

Bloodhound shakes their head as he lets them go and lowers his hands with visible, murderous exertion. "I only meant to-"

"Just. Just take them out."

Bloodhound maneuvers their smallest knife between one eye and its socket between breaths so as not to mar the perfect sphere. Revenant grows impatient and wrenches the other out of his skull with his own hand before Bloodhound can stop him. 

Curious. His code does not deem this part of the body essential.

They are successful in batting away his encroaching hands as they tease the remaining one out of his socket and painstakingly sever the optical cords.

"Please humor me. If you could choose," they say as they cut, "What would you be?"

"I don't know. Whatever. Blood on the wall."

The eye is free. Bloodhound pockets it. 

"Step outside of yourself. You live here, in this place. Compete here. What do you see around you?" 

"Blood. Empty shells. Blood."

"And?"

"Iron. Rust. Blood."

They consider giving it up. A man cannot see what he does not want to see.

"Air," he says.

Their hands rise to unclasp their respirator. Bloodhound hums thoughtfully.

"Go on. Describe it."

Bloodhound touches him. Passes over materials smooth and coarse and soft and hard. Rigid chest. Smooth arms. A hard brow. A soft, pliant jaw. 

"Oxygen," he says. "Filtered. Clean."

A softer, flexible neck. When he feels their hands sweep down the column of his throat, he raises his head to expose more. 

"Yes," they encourage him. "Go on."

They move aside the fabric around his neck and follow the ridges at each side of his throat with the tips of their fingers. They move closer to him. This deep red material is not as cold or rigid as the rest. It gives.

Maybe they could maneuver their fingertips to simulate a bite. Would he know the difference?

"The air..."

This stretch of his neck had been covered by the fabric. It is as clean and inoffensive as it will ever be. When they are right here, and he is right there, it suddenly feels stranger not to close the gap.

"...in your lungs."

He inhales sharply as they close their teeth on the lip of one of the winding ridges. Another simulated, vestigial reaction. 

"Keep going," Bloodhound says as they part from him to watch the material struggle to reform around the lingering impressions. "What do you do? What do you want?"

"Want you to breathe me in deep."

His voice skips at another bite, lower, harder.

"Want so much of me in you th-that y-"

He is unintelligible as they scrape their teeth along the highest point of his throat.

"-th-that y-you choke on me."

Bloodhound had moved their lips out of the way, but still they begin to taste him. Plains dust. River salt. Metal so heady and overpowering that they could mistake it for blood in their mouth. They run their tongue across their teeth.

They move up, just under his jaw. They draw their knife.

"When you kill me...cut me open-"

They pierce him and pull down, opening his crimson throat.

He slams the back of his head against the floor when he realizes what Bloodhound is doing. "Fuck. Yes. Yes-"

They hold him still at the base of his neck. "Focus."

"When you...when you kill..."

He groans as their ungloved fingers slip inside.

"-wanna be the iron in your blood."

They strum the taut cords inside his neck and listen to the answering sounds. A bit of tuning, and they could play their favorite Edda verse. 

When his metallic, skipping, glitching groans grow too harsh, Bloodhound slips out and lets him rest. 

"Want. Want you to. You to..." he skips as he recovers, "...lick me off when. When. When. When you b-bite your lip 'til it. It. It. It splits."

He has strayed somewhat from the spirit of Bloodhound's exercise, but they are too amused at his mindless little declarations to discourage him. They find an unimportant-looking little cord and close their teeth, only to jerk back and cough when something hits the back of their throat.

Revenant hums luridly. "Wanna b-be that oil you're spitting out."

Bloodhound wipes their mouth on their sleeve with a disgusted huff and raises their respirator as their coughing dizzies them. Their face flushes so deeply and quickly that the pulses of heat and needle-like prickling become unbearable. 

"Would that there was an end to all your little insinuations," they bark. "I am beginning to doubt you feel any pain at all."

"'Course I do. I c-can scream and beg more often, if. If. If you like."

"That is not- I only mean, what do you...from this, what..."

"What I get out of it?"

"Yes."

"But you already know." 

He slowly raises a wandering, sightless hand. It finds their chin. 

"What are you really hungry for, hunter?" 

Bloodhound lets the digits wander around. Circling their chin. Dipping into one corner of their mouth. They sigh at the relief of cold metal on hot skin.

"I do not know. Certainty. Peace."

He hums thoughtfully. "Lot of ways to die," he starts.

The tip of one cool finger traces the seam of their mouth. Without thinking, their lips part for him. 

They hear a blip of interference as his finger stills. A facsimile of a hard swallow. 

"Lotta ways to feel good," he says as his hand falls.

Their head swims as it howls for meaning. "Your...desire is...is a spiritual one, then."

His other hand feels its way up their arm and to the back of their head. He pulls them closer. 

"Of course," he rumbles in their ear. "Isn't yours?"

Bloodhound steps outside once he is dead. They lay on the earth, open their jacket, and invite the nightly chill to take all it wants until they are cool enough to think again. 

They find an agreeable crook in the thick, surface roots of a flowering tree and dig a deep, narrow hole with their hands. The arena autocleaner mechs will eventually find that particular body, and any other within its borders. It will either dump it in some landfill, or crush it for parts.

They withdraw the simulacrum's eye from their jacket and appraise it one last time. One of thousands. Millions, maybe. But none entirely like this one. They invite the first light from the rising sun to catch the clean cut of the cords and the still-gleaming half of the sphere that had rested against the socket. 

They let it fall inside and return the displaced earth. In a year, the roots will have embraced it. In many more, age will expose and soften the eye's intricate parts and grant the patient roots their decadent, long-awaited mineral feast. In still more, fauna will have eaten these enriched leaves and cooled and given birth beneath its canopy and breathed their last among its fallen branches.

May he course from this eye and through these roots and into the bloodstream of so many beasts and all of their offspring that, one day, all their beating crimson combined outweighs all that he has ever spilled. Bloodhound will not be alive to see it. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this one has the "I wrote this scene two chapters ago and have no choice but to build up to it" scene, have fun

That night, Bloodhound dreams of a fine red mist. It fills their nose, their mouth, their eyes. Sinks into their blood.

They strike another deal. Another deathless week. Another reward for good behavior. At the end of it, they meet in that same cabin. 

He pulls at them, grips and squeezes them. Moves his hands over their arms and flattens his palms against the rolling, working muscle at their back. Bloodhound thinks they have begun to understand why. Much of his pawing is a mindless reaction to a cut or a shock, but not all. A firm grip on a fresh bruise or on some innocent, long-untouched stretch of their waist or neck, and their axe falls harder. Their knife cuts deeper. 

They needn't wonder anymore how he enjoys this with so few directions or commands. When he has the mind to do it, he tunes and strums them to his liking. 

They could stop it. Tie him up. Split his wandering hands and arms from his body. They mean to. They should. But by the time they step over him and his digits extend to wrap around their wrist or waist or hips and guide them to their knees, they always seem to forget.

He all but begs for their teeth again but finally gives it up when he senses that their betrayal at that one last cord is too fresh. He suggests instead, as nonchalantly as he is able, his own.

Bloodhound pulls out of him and straightens their back with a satisfying pop. Moves to hover over his face and sweep a finger across a firm, unmoving lip. 

"Maybe," they say. "In another life."

"How little imagination," he says. He doesn't elaborate.

Bits of him are embedded in the walls and floors and in the weave of Bloodhound's jacket and trousers when they are done. 

They agree on another week. That night, Bloodhound dreams of skinning a winter hare. They cut and pull for hours. Always, another pelt beneath the first. They do not stop even when blizzard winds bury them alive in leaden snow.

There is no knowing how much longer this arrangement will satisfy him. But while it does, hearts that would have been torn from their chests will go on beating. 

They do not intend to go on blind. Bloodhound discretely asks around to find some meaning in his coveted shocks. 

His sudden fascination could be a symptom of something more sinister. They ask Crypto if he has ever hacked a simulacrum. If anyone has. What it would take. How long it would last. He is spare with his words, but admits to succeeding once in prying information from an unwitting sec ops sim. His best program survived one-sixteenth of a second.

It may be a desire inherent to the mechanical body. They ask Wattson if certain materials or machines prefer harsher or unorthodox treatment. She talks up a storm about everything in the world, but little of it is intelligible to them, and she is far too perceptive to not realize who they are talking about should Bloodhound dare to be more specific.

It may be an echo of the old flesh. They ask Ajay Che if she has ever witnessed a human's preference or even obsession with shock. Adrenaline, she says easily, and directs their eye to Octavio if they want a closer study. 

Close, but not close enough. Silva chases thrills. Pain is incidental. Revenant would not dream of having one without the other. Silva is a crowd pleaser. The simulacrum, having scoped out every hidden place in all of King's Canyon and inviting Bloodhound to take their pick, has an audience of one.

Would that it were only his desires that plague them.

When Bloodhound first wakes, and in the few minutes before they descend into sleep, their blood begins to sing. As their mind clambers out of the oblivion of sleep, their limbs stiffen with a new tension. It takes longer each morning to stretch and warm them, to prepare for the coming day.

Bloodhound forbids themself from interrogating one particular element of their encounters, but bruises and aches whine louder in bed when nothing and no one is left to distract them. Their hands sink beneath sheets and furs to comfort ailing thighs and legs. Rise to rub at a hipbone he had knocked once too often when his hands found a home around their waist. 

The first time they tell themself that they lower their hand accidentally, they find their body so desperate for relief that it shocks them wide awake. They dress light and sit outside among the howling winds until the flesh is disciplined. Until the phantom taste of oil leaves their mouth. 

They avoid the bruises from then on, but it is too late. Discovering their body's betrayal and punishing its transgression only emboldens it. The next night, the heat is not only hungrier but obstinate. It does not cool no matter how long they tremble miserably on their porch.

When they return to bed and warm under the furs with the last of the winds still howling in their lungs, they give in. Despite relenting with the most perfunctory performance they can summon, the release blinds them. They feel it in the morning. In every loosened muscle. Every feather-light limb. 

In the final round the next day, they land every shrieking pellet of a Peacekeeper into his skull. That night, their back arches.

They have gone without for years. They never wanted or needed it, not after the first. It is not abstinence if there is no desire to abstain from.

Maybe it is not so complicated. The body is a partner to the mind, not its tool. Not its slave. They ridicule and ignore its wants at their own risk. They have not been touched like this in more years than they care to know. 

They have not been needed - like this - ever. 

Bloodhound finds themself paying more attention to him than they ever have. They learn that he lets Silva rig explosives to his chest even when they are competitors - provided the team he intends to blow apart does not have Ajay Che on it.

His regard for Che is even more curious. He stops at nothing to disqualify her as competitors and yet never shoots to kill, and guards her jealously when they are teammates. Endlessly pacing around her and towering over her to block and disorient lines of sight. All this despite having no bones for her to set. No skin for her to sew shut.

Bloodhound recalls an old rumor that she once pantomimed CPR on him mid-match, something so bizarre that everyone laughed it off easily, then. Bloodhound is not so sure now. They have watched him gasp without lungs. Caught, on more than one occasion, his hand rising instinctively to a bullet wound as if to stop its bleeding. 

It is not so strange anymore, that his human body still cries out for its stolen partner.

It is when he is paired with Wattson that Bloodhound has to smother unkind thoughts. After a memorable show of disintegrating force, he has moved on from menacing her to grudgingly behaving himself should he be so lucky that she is in the mood to repair him. 

It is the final day of their agreement when Bloodhound stops at a corner bar at Solace's orbital station. The bar's grimy screens run the current match. Arena cameras are poised on the two.

Bloodhound stops because her hands are inside him. 

They glance around, but no one pays it any more mind than they usually would at a bloodsport. It must look perfectly normal to these people. The brilliant young engineer tinkering with a machine.

Bloodhound cannot hear what is being said between them, though her mouth moves and stops here and there as they imagine he replies with his own unmoving lips. When they are done, he moves faster than Silva. He picks off combatants with a single shot. That they win is self-evident the moment she bolted his chest panel shut.

Bloodhound does not stay to watch the girl leap for joy and land a daring little pat on her handiwork. They wander around the lower parts of the station where they will not be recognized.

The image follows them like a sun's afterburn. Deft, lightning-swift hands clipping and rearranging and soldering inside a neatly pried-open chest.

They hear a familiar, delicate clinking only a moment before someone covers their lenses with their hands.

"Guess who, lovely."

They were not expecting her, but they would pray at the altar of whatever inspired her to find them exactly here and now.

"I was not expecting you, Doctor Caustic."

They are whirled around with a scandalized gasp and slapped firmly on the shoulder.

"You dog," Loba pouts.

She walks them out of the lower levels with an arm looped through theirs. Bloodhound thinks of something believable when she asks why they were prowling around down there when their dearest fans are up here. Bloodhound moves diplomatically through the gathering throng as she showers signatures and compliments and selfies while somehow keeping pace with them.

"Busy tonight?" she asks when they are mostly free of the crowd.

"I have an appointment," they say. "Planet-side."

"Important?"

Clipping. Rearranging. Soldering.

"Just some...administrative nonsense." 

"Reschedule. I have something for you on my ship."

They shouldn't. But they cannot touch him today.

They reach the docks and board her ship. Loba takes them to the lounge and introduces the person browsing the bookshelves. Bloodhound recognizes her instantly. They tear across the room and try their best not to shake the hand right off of their guest as the woman beams at them both, a touch star-struck herself.

When their guest bids them a fond goodbye and leaves the ship after hours upon hours of feverish discussion and plans to pursue their work further, Bloodhound wraps Loba in their arms before the door has fully shut.

She laughs as they swing her around once, twice. "Hound-"

"You remembered," they say as they return her to her feet. "I make one small comment eons ago about the ailments of some- some small nowhere village and you- you just..." 

She preens. "Who else is better equipped to find your fugitive professor?"

"No one. No one else."

She had paid for the professor's travel, room and board, security, and even a deposit on her time until a contract can be hammered out. The scholar and her team were unmatched in their day for saving ecosystems from the brink, right up until she ran afoul of a Syndicate operation and had no choice but to vanish and continue her work through intermediaries. 

Bloodhound had lamented once of the state of the earth and her creatures around a village near their own. That it had grown so dire despite all their efforts that they feared only this near-mythical figure would have the wisdom to help them return life to their home.

"How can I ever-"

"Not a word of that. Are you happy?"

Their throat closes. They embrace her again, because it is all they can do.

She blows off a match to join them the next day on a trail. She is flushed with exertion by the time the sun sets. Her hair is everywhere and there is dust and earth in every seam of her jacket, but she beams when she makes a difficult jump or strikes a fire on the first try. 

Jaime conspiratorially reveals that she slept off the trials of the trip until mid afternoon the next day.

It is a palatial ship. She brings all her treasures with her. Jaime included. 

She invites them back. Bloodhound moves through her collections as she deals with her guests and promises to be back in a second.

They walk past jewelry and experimental tech. The rarest stones. Shelves and cases and vaults of banned books and films.

It is hours later when she tears through the hall to them and apologizes profusely all along the way for losing track of time. They move to a warm little dining area for lunch where Bloodhound does not recognize half of what she playfully offers. 

She asks them to be her plus one for some private party at some eccentric trillionaire's expense. Crowded. Extravagant. An irresistible mark.

"I would, but I am spent from the most recent press junket."

"Ah, I forget. They give you no choice, reigning champion."

They do not. Bloodhound is often given little as a day's notice before they are whisked away to this or that station or planet to stand tall or to sign half a thousand posters and figures and foreheads. 

There are more invitations from her, always more. Bloodhound takes her up on a few, and though they love watching her in her element, it begins to wear on them, this life. There is so much performance. So much pointless artifice. Somehow, a person of her heart and humanity thrives in this. Weaponizes it as naturally as Bloodhound would master uncharted wilds.

Or the games. They are at peace when they stride on earth and grass and peat again. When dust rises at their footfall.

They have almost forgotten him, but he has not forgotten them. 

Revenant finds them mid-match and throws them into a blind spot behind a shack where it leans against a canyon wall. 

"Missed you last week," he says. 

They say nothing. 

"Heard they carted you off to look pretty for them. Could've sworn the press fleet came back sooner..."

They say nothing. His hand rises to their face. They move away.

He freezes. "Someone died, didn't they," he growls. "Bled out when the medics got sloppy? Infection the next day?" He stalks toward them, incensed. "Should I list off everyone you kill while I waste shots blowing off hands and feet instead of..."

Bloodhound says nothing. They turn to leave. Revenant checks their shoulder and spins them back around.

"No..." he muses, his earlier ire cooling as his eyes rove over the set of their head, their stance, the heightened rise and fall of their chest. 

They should drop this and get on as before. It is childish, at best. Then they glance at his body. At the neat, expertly shut seams.

"No, you're too pissed for it to be-" 

"Who else?" they ask.

"What?"

"Who else plays with your circuits?"

To their brief but immense satisfaction, he is struck dumb. 

Bloodhound raises their axe and scratches a long, sloppy line through the perfect seams. They wipe metal residue from the blade.

"You watch my games? I'm touched. Then I don't need to tell you we were pinned between three teams," he says.

"Welcome to King's Canyon. A fly cannot sneeze without half the island knowing it."

"What a sweet girl she is. Should I have thrown her to the wolves? You realize 'no deaths' includes my teammates?"

"She has a respawn chamber."

"How cruel-"

"And she is a fighter as worthy of glory as any one of us. You deny her this when you coddle her."

"What she did isn't even in the same universe as-"

They stalk toward him until they have him against the canyon wall. "Are you so pitiful that you could not have won without it?"

Somehow, he doesn't rise to it. Bloodhound does not remember the last time he allowed a slight to pass unchallenged. He wraps his hand around Bloodhound's, the one that is holding their axe. He guides the blade back to his chest.

"Ruin it."

Bloodhound looks at the seams. They pull free of him. Their axe falls.

"No."

"Chop it all up."

Bloodhound wills themself to draw satisfaction at the thought of it. They cannot.

He grabs them by their shoulders and gives them a hard shake. "Wag your tongue," he growls impatiently.

It is too stupid to admit aloud. That he was touched by healing hands. Hands that repair and strengthen, while their own can only destroy. That anyone, surely, eventually, would prefer one over the other.

Wordlessly, they shove him off. 

He gives them one last look, strides out from behind the shack, finds the highest, most revealing spot in the region, and empties both R-99s into the air until a charged round shrieks through his skull from half a mile away. His perfectly tuned body collapses and raises plumes of dust.

They meet Loba on her ship after the match with mist in their head, but their dinner is cut short when Jaime flags approaching mercs.

Every so often, she gets word of an incoming visit from an investigator or private fleet contracted by whichever aggrieved miser she stole from most recently. She has no choice but to run, give them a chase and lose them in some nebula or distant planet. Shoot them down, if it comes to that.

Bloodhound wishes her good fortune and watches her ship pull away from the Solace station docks. Dock hands weave around them as they wheel cargo, hound captains for signatures, operate lifts and adjust their weight-bearing exoskeletons. Bloodhound watches their hands work, and their own begin to itch.

They return to Solace between matches. They find him, and silently take him apart. They are honoring their end of the bargain. Nothing more.

He, in turn, does not touch them, even at the harshest shocks. They pretend to not feel the absence. 

Suddenly, he rises on his elbows.

"Blood."

His tone unsettles them. They withdraw their arm and ready their axe.

Without any more warning, his face splits open in three, no, four, and unfurls like a serrated flower. 

"Impressive," Bloodhound breathes as they force their heart back down from their throat. They laugh at this, his idea of a presentation.

"You may attract a fine partner among the many hives of Talos arthrojackals," they add.

His face retracts back to its usual self with a delicate, metallic whirr as he makes a self-satisfied little sound. He sits up further until it is not Bloodhound who hovers over him, but he who rises to meet their eye as they move back and slide into his lap.

"I look forward to it," he says, lips parting around each word as he supports his caved, crackling chest with both arms locked behind him. "Here's the boring one in the meantime."

There is no demonstration after he speaks, because it has already happened. He has just spoken as convincingly with his mouth as would anyone else. Bloodhound cannot speak. They can hardly breathe. 

"My dealer offered to throw in the rest of the face," he goes on as Bloodhound slips one hand out of their glove, "but I told 'em...." 

He trails off as Bloodhound leans forward and reaches for him. The pad of their finger presses into that normally firm carving and instead sinks with unbelievable, natural ease. Their mind struggles to not perceive it as the flesh it so faithfully emulates. As they pinch and roll him between thumb and forefinger, they find even a convincingly damp underside. Teeth. A tongue. 

Revenant speaks without moving his mouth this time:

"Clever bit of engineering, isn't it?"

If they thought seeing his mouth move convincingly around his words was stunning before, hearing him speak without moving now that they know he is capable of it is somehow even more unsettling. 

"Ready to concede?"

Their hand drops from his face with great effort. "So it is possible," they say nonchalantly. "You win."

"How boring. Not like that," he says, moving his mouth around his words again. He strains to balance on a single arm and pulls at a respirator cord with the other.

"I don't..."

He pulls until their helm knocks against his head. Until his mouth hovers just before their mask.

"Yes, you do." 

"I said-"

"Another life. Didn't say whose."

Bloodhound frees themself and turns away. "I did not survive this far by sticking my head into the maws of wild beasts." 

"Wild?" He slips his fingers under their chin and turns them back. "You've got me good and tamed and you know it," he says. "I'll bark, if you want. Roll over. Play dead."

"We are not- this is...this is something that is done between-"

"A simple mechanical demonstration," he says. "Like trying out a massage chair. A new toothbrush."

"I do not know why you keep trying to convince me."

"'Cause you're begging me to and you don't even know it."

"You are so sure of yourself, as usual."

"All your words and not one of them is _no_."

"I have not said yes."

"Another week."

"What?"

"No. A month. No one dies."

Bloodhound is grateful he cannot see their jaw drop. 

He traces the metal holes in their mask's filter cartridge. 

"Wherever you want it. Hell, keep this on."

Bloodhound shoves him. 

"Know when to stop," they say.

Revenant's chipped, slashed, sparking arms strain as he closes the distance between them again until he is at their ear.

"Then back to business," he says coldly. "Carve me up, penetrate me, root around inside and ride me while I scream-"

Bloodhound gives him a blow so sudden and powerful that they are both shocked at the resounding crack of his skull against the floor.

While he is stunned, they put an end to their encounter with a final unrelenting shock.

They do not remember how they left, whether they ran, what they said, what they did not say. They take the next station-bound cargo ship, ignore an offer to join crew quarters, and only in the dark, flickering, rumbling hold do they let the entirety of the tremor run its way out of their bones. 

They are not some blushing youth. They are aware that what they do together has, perhaps, certain similarities, maybe, to another kind of activity.

But they are not doing that. They are killing, and being killed. Bloodhound has opened him so often that if he could bleed, they would have long since drowned in him. 

An insolent thought pries into their skull.

 _He was right. You did not say no. You could have said no._

It is the second time they have panicked. Missed a promised meeting or ended it too soon because of some petty, adolescent insecurity. They cannot be this flighty. Clumsy. Dishonorable. Not for his sake or anyone else's, but their own. It will not happen again.

In the following match, Revenant does not kill. One week passes, then another. A third. When the fourth week begins to pass without deaths, Bloodhound knows they have to find him. He knows they never agreed to it. But whatever horrors come or do not come at the end of this month, they will be on their conscience if they do not find him soon. 

Loba makes it back to Solace, having paid a doppelganger of her ship to lure and strand the mercs in extrasolar space. Bloodhound receives a worrying invitation. It asks them to hurry.

When they visit her, she greets them and offers them this, that, and the moon, but her words are clipped and fast. Nervous. They ask what ails her as she launches into some aside about the history of the wine in the glass she holds with great effort.

She laughs unconvincingly. "Oh, nothing. I asked around and...and I still don't..."

She hugs herself with one hand and picks at her nails with the other.

"Why is he not killing?" she demands. "The press will not stop howling about his...his...they call it a..."

"What does it matter what they call it?"

"Of course it matters. They're painting him as some tortured soul reformed by...by 'teamwork' and - hah! - 'camaraderie'!"

When she laughs, it is a mean, sharp sound. They guide her with the arm that slips inside him, and sit her down on one of the lounge's many extravagantly crafted - stolen - divans.

"I know you would not prefer that he kill again-"

"You think too highly of me, Hound. If they are mercs, killers themselves, why the hell not? It's the narrative that kills me. This...this success story they're whipping up, it's...it's just... "

"Hypothetically. What would you have him do?"

"Throw himself into a black hole."

"Besides that."

"A supermassive black hole."

They laugh softly. She sighs and rests her head on their shoulder. 

"Sorry, I'm being...it's probably nothing. I come back after running around the system and now he's this..." She swallows and hides her face in the fur lining their collar as Bloodhound takes the precariously tipping glass from her hand and sets it on the hand-crafted - stolen - coffee table. "Thanks, Hound." 

She leans in to their cheek before stopping herself and jerking away.

"Oh, oops, sorry, it's automatic when I've had a glass."

"What is?"

"Ugh, you would make me say it, wouldn't you. I wanted to give you a peck, happy?"

Bloodhound thinks. "No."

She sobers instantly. "I'm really sorry-"

"No, I mean...I...would not mind."

"Please don't joke like that."

"I am serious."

"You...you are? Oh," she groans, "not on that leather, surely. I knew you were pulling my leg."

They laugh lightly at her feigned misery. They take her hand, guide it underneath a flap at their helm, and show her where to unclasp their respirator with just a little tremor, though they have taken it off before when they dined aboard this very ship.

They reach clumsily for the handkerchief in their jacket as the metal and padding begin to slide off, supported only by the bridge of their nose and held precariously by the remaining clasp on the other side. "One moment, it...uh...it gets...stuffy-"

They do not make it. She lands one on them before more than an inch or so of their cheek makes it to the light.

They huff theatrically. "But it is..."

She hums fondly. "You're so fussy. You think I can wait until you primp and perfume?"

They tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "You make me wait quite often."

After lunch, she walks them out and gives them another. 

"For the road," she says.

Bloodhound enters the cabin that night. Their cabin. He is veiled in shadow, betrayed only by a twin flash of yellow.

"You're funny, Blood," he says. "First you bail, now you come uninvited."

He was clearly expecting them. They watch his mouth as he speaks. Rigid. Unmoving.

"Your mod-"

"Dumped it," he says.

"I...ah. It looked well made."

"Oh, very. Just connecting the nerves took a full day."

Bloodhound shuts the door and approaches where he sits on the bottom steps of a half-charred staircase. "It has been one month."

"So? We never agreed."

"You know what you are doing. Taking advantage of my good faith, my sense of...." They sigh, frustrated. "If you appear before me again with that...modification, I will..."

"Don't do me any favors."

"But all month-"

"Nothing to do with you. I was just thinking. After our weekly experiments....the kills right after? In that one day between one and the other? They're something else," he says. "But a whole month...all that pent up energy released all at once...it's gonna be..."

Explosive. Unfathomable carnage. 

"Don't you worry," he says. "I'll make up my tally on day one." 

"You will not."

Once more, he does not rise to a direct challenge. Instead, he considers them. His eyes rove over them as if looking for something.

"Finish that sentence, _Hound_. If I wear it again..."

"If you wear it again..."

He rises from his seat and stalks toward them.

"You may - briefly - demonstrate," they say.

He walks them backward. Crowds them against a wall. Tips their head up at their chin until he is sure they are looking nowhere else. 

Blood rushes in their ears as he speaks. Because when he does, his mouth parts around one word:

"Promise?"

They temper their anger, but just barely. He watches them. Licks his lips as he waits. 

"Andskoti," they bite under their breath. "Yes."

They sit him down and take his eyes first. He does not argue. To them, an attempt at privacy. To him, some inexplicable thrill. As they pocket them, he rises and shoves them back against the wall. 

They expect something quick. That was their first mistake. When he enjoys himself, nothing about him is quick. 

When the respirator falls and dangles from one clasp, his mouth passes theirs and meets the cut of their jaw instead. He trails his lips - warm and feeling not an atom unlike flesh and blood - along the curve of their jaw to their chin as his hands rise to cradle their face and hold them steady. Bloodhound's own rise to his wrists. They force themself to breathe. 

A warm and pliant bottom lip soothes the hard press of the cool and rigid upper plate as he trails licks and shallow, testy bites from chin to the corner of their mouth and off across their cheek with excruciating leisure. They wonder if he can taste her lipstick. 

He dips down again. Licks, bites, sucks at the delicate, long-untouched skin beneath the join of their ear and jaw. He is hot inside. Almost too hot. Every touch is a brand. Their breath catches when they realize the source of a strange, secondary sting and they cannot reclaim it without briefly bringing their respirator back to their mouth. He has not one set of teeth but two. A smaller, sharper set has been trailing and scoring and nipping at their skin the entire time.

A sharper bite than the rest pulls a low, lingering groan from their chest. An admonishment rises in their thoughts but never makes it to their tongue before their nerves hum at the lingering ache.

Time crawls. A thousand jötunn could not have opened Bloodhound's eyes. 

"I did not...take you for a romantic," they whisper. They do not trust their ability to speak any louder.

They can feel his scalding mouth answer against their skin. 

"No," he whispers back. "But you are."

When he moves away, cold air rushes in to pluck cruelly at their heated, aching skin. They are not sure if he drew blood. Not sure if they prefer that he had. He moves to the other side, ignoring their mouth again, even as they inch forward in anticipation.

Shame cools them at their own thoughtless, wanton motion.

"I do not have an eternity," Bloodhound growls. 

He licks their earlobe into his mouth before sweeping his broad, hot tongue along the shell of their ear.

"I do," he says.

They do not think about it. It is as much a reflex as a cry after a stunning blow. They take his face with both hands and wrench him away, and before he can speak, pull down hard until their lips finally meet. 

They feel steel teeth behind his closed mouth. His upper lip plate digs into their nose as the softer one beneath begins to part.

"You dog," Revenant rumbles against them, mouth parting around his words. "I thought you liked it slow."

They do not even begin to think how to respond before he opens them, licks into them, bites their lip, bites their tongue. Turns his head for more. Tips their head for more. In an instant, Bloodhound is full of him, surrounded by him, drowning in him. 

He fills them so entirely and so aggressively that their jaw begins to ache. Everything begins to ache. His tongue splits into two and three to taste them everywhere at once. One coarse, the other smooth. The third, indescribable.

Their shoulder blades and the back of their head whine at the weight pinning them to the hard wall. Their hipbones sting where they knock and grind against a steel pelvis as their lungs strain to fill against the broad, metal torso driving into them as if he means to merge them here, too. 

His hands slip into their jacket. Their own fingers must have pierced the coarse fabric of his scarf by now with the strain of staying where they are instead of finding his and showing him where to go.

As the pains and aches grow unbearable in every way they possibly can, the haze in their mind grows until they are lost in it entirely. Lost in a fine red mist. 

They watch their own limbs move as if outside of themself. They slip out of his hold, throw him to the floor, unsheathe their axe and split open his chest. As his head rolls back with a harsh groan, Bloodhound kneels over him and scrapes the split wires against his chest wall with such violence that Revenant splinters the floorboards with his clawing hands. They split open his throat. Lash at his abdomen. Hack and cut and bite until little but prayer holds together whatever remains of his body.

Exhaustion spills into their limbs, the thing that finally starts to dissipate the mist. Bloodhound wills intelligent thought back into their head, but it is futile. They are too far gone. They have never been this far gone. Here. Like this. With someone like him.

"Do-Don't. D-d-don't fucking. ing. ng. S. St. St. Stop," he begs.

Bloodhound manages to shove their dangling respirator to their mouth. Every breath is a tortured, shuddering thing. 

Revenant reaches for them with what little remains of his one remaining working arm and scores the back of their jacket until he breaks skin. 

"Pl-please," he begs. "Pl-"

They arch at the sting, thrust back inside, and shock him dead.

Bloodhound remains kneeling over him. Bleeding, panting, gasping over him.

Their hope that his absence will cool the inferno incinerating every last inch of them is dashed the moment the cabin is quiet again but for their labored breathing. They realize it was only the indignity of him witnessing them unfurl - smug, triumphant - that they were able to last this long.

They cannot leave like this. One firm breeze would halve them at the knees. As their mind sputters uselessly - turn away? next room? wait? stand? - one hand passes of its own will below their belt as the other wraps around his split neck. 

Bloodhound pictures the day they both fall for the last time, and doubles over with stars in their eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> taking a lil break now before i spontaneously combust


End file.
